Second year team project | Sep 2020 – May 2021 | Unity

A 1-4 player, couch co-op, heist game. The goal is to steal the most amount of money from the bank vault than your fellow heisters, survive the oncoming police whilst you wait for your getaway vehicle to arrive.

This game was developed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Team Practice

Low-Poly Platypus was a team of 14 people, with the composition: 2 Designers, 3 Programmers, 5 Artists, 1 Sound Designer, 1 Animator and 2 Writers.

Key Software and Skills utilised:

• Git
• Trello
• Practice of SCRUM and AGILE

We were amidst the Covid-19 pandemic when this project started and ended. The whole team did suffer because of the remote working aspect of this project, it was the first time many of us had done remote work, and alongside other assignments and just the general state of what was happening in the world, it had a really bad effect on all of our mental health. This did lead to many occasions of miscommunication, disagreements and it did leave everyone in the team feeling unmotivated by the end. Despite this, the project did pull through and we were able to deliver something resembling our original vision at the deadline for our project.

Systems Design

I contributed a considerable amount towards the game’s design document, as well as the documentation for the individual weapons and abilities each of the characters had. This document was where we balanced the stats of each of the items as well as listing the item’s intended functionality.

Key Software and Skills utilised:

• Design documentation
• System Flowcharts

UI/UX Design

Original UI design, through poor communication the design got messed up, artist overhauled the art used for the UI, maintaining the design elements. I implemented these for the expo build for this game., and fixed the layout issue.

Menus – Character select, main menu, loading screen, end screen

The character select screen was one of my core responsibilities during this project, a large portion of my time went towards it’s design and trying to get it to work as was intended.

This was one of the first showcases of the character select screen actually working, scriptable objects were used to store character data, which the character select screen accessed and loaded as the player hovered over the different characters.

I polished some of the menu animations and added a set-dressed scene to act as the backdrop, this was to add some visual interest to the menu and to match the main menu screen.

I created the main menu and loading screen nearer to the end of the project, at this point we had invested in an asset pack and decided it was a good opportunity to create something visually interesting and to try get some of the heist story elements back into the game via the main menu and loading screen. I used the asset pack to create the scene, set-dressing and all and then used Unity’s inbuilt animation system to create basic animations around the set. I made a rough lay out of the UI elements and requested arranged more polished elements to be created by one of the artists in the team.

This is what the final main menu looked like after replacing the placeholder UI with the polished UI elements, adding post-processing to the scene and adding a slight glitch animation to the Legal Tender logo.

The loading screen acted as a bridge between the character select and the main game. It was a necessary screen as elements did need to load. I used the opportunity to design it around a chase scene, again trying to tie in the theme of a heist. The animations were created using Unity’s inbuilt animation system.

Character Design

Key Software and Skills utilised:

• Photoshop

Kacie’s name was misspelt on purpose, the KC stood for Kitten Conquest, which was the game I worked on in my first year of university.

Marketing

Key Software and Skills utilised:

• DaVinci Resolve
• Coordinating Peers

One of artists, Kate Hookham, created the initial script for the trailer. Both myself and one of the programmers, James Heath, helped to refine the script.

I knew the voice actor from college, and I worked with him to get the voice used inside of the trailer made. I coordinated my team to get some multiplayer footage together to be used within the trailer.

Using Unity’s animator, I animated scenes in engine to be used for the trailer. This included the opening chair scene and camera pans around the level. I then used DaVinci Resolve to edit, animate and bring everything for the trailer together.